15 - The Thin Line Between Eugenics and Preventive Medicine

Summary

THE ISSUE

The history of science in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries has a special place for “racism” - its origins, its causes, and its perseverance. Political history does as well. Racism and its consequences are one of the very few issues where both histories meet in an obvious and explicit fashion. Since the beginning of the nineteenth century, “race,” whatever other origins and uses it had, has been a scientific term. The history of the applied science of eugenics, or race hygiene, as it was called in Germany and the Scandinavian countries, has been connected to racism, and owing to its history, so has its heir, human genetics. Racism, particularly anti-Semitism, although it has many roots, has become equated with “scientific racism,” that is, with race biology and race hygiene. The closest link is undoubtedly the use of elements of biology and anthropology in Nazi ideology, so much so that the scientists involved labeled National Socialism “applied biology.” But there is also a different tradition implied with eugenics - that of preventive social medicine. It too, primarily because of the Nazi experience, has been linked to social discrimination or “social racism.” The specter of this legacy continues to haunt contemporary human genetics and has cast a shadow over recent technological advances in the mapping of the human genome.

This chapter asks whether the sciences are responsible for racism in society, and if experiences in the fairly recent past can guide present-day judgments about the potential racism of scientific research.The answer is twofold: It is at best much too simple and at worst misleading to apply the categories of the past, that is, German race hygiene, to judge the present and future of human genetics; but a reflection on past experience can provide guidance as to how we should evaluate present developments. Rather than assuming a unilinear causation between scientific theories and racism in society and politics, the analysis shows that predominant categories in science and their interpretative potential co-evolve with the social values embedded in the political culture.